Regret

This week I watched one of the latest BBC documentaries, “Anton Ferdinand: Football, Racism and Me”. The documentary logged one of the most painful experiences in Anton Ferdinand’s life. Just under ten years ago, he was racially abused on the football pitch by the England captain, John Terry. As the documentary unveiled the severity of the impact the incident had on Ferdinand, I was struck by how much regret Ferdinand has over how he reacted (or did not react) at the time.

More than once, during the course of the documentary, Ferdinand expresses regret that he did not put out more public statements and also put much more in those public statements. This regret seemed to plague him almost as much as the actions of Terry. In today’s post I consider whether this regret, whilst understandable, is helpful or even fair.

We all have regrets and look back, sometimes years, and castigate our former selves for things we did or said, or for things we didn’t do or say. I discuss how our past affects us in my book, “A Good Sailor Calm Seas Do Not Make: Building Resilience for Everyday Living”, and it is clear that past regret can really harm our self-worth. However, if we change how we view regret it can be kept in check and we can actually use it positively.

First, we are very often grossly unfair on ourselves when we wallow in regret. You see, we know now how everything panned out. We now have the benefit of hindsight and can view the incident in a mental state where we are potentially a few steps (or more) removed from the circumstances of the time. We know much more now than what we knew at that time and most importantly our feelings will have changed from how we felt in the moment.

Those who have read my work know that I promote strategies for reacting to things based on rational thought and not on the basis of “feelings” or emotions. Feelings are usually driven by fear and are usually inaccurate interpretations of a situation (or at best a partial understanding). Emotions are very much a human response nonetheless – given how our brains are wired. Professor Steve Peters deals with this much better than I do, in his book, “The Chimp Paradox”.

Everyone around Ferdinand, at the time of the racist abuse, guided him against speaking out publicly. Ferdinand recalls that he wanted to at the time. In essence he listened to those around him because they were trying to protect him. His regret is therefore unfair and unreasonable to himself.

The 26 year old lad accepted the advice for a reason. It was a reason which worked, at the time. He clearly felt ‘all over the place’ and the people he trusted most advised him to let the authorities go through their processes. John Terry was summonsed to court (as a member of the public reported it to police) and the English Football Association were investigating the incident. All the 26 year old wanted to do was play football.

So why the regret now? Ferdinand is in a classic case of where he now knows more than he possibly could have back then. He is projecting his knowledge in 2020 and unfairly criticising his 2011 self – who was not only younger, but was in a very different personal situation in a very different circumstance to what exists today. He now knows that football is taking racist incidents much more seriously and that understanding of the impact of these incidents is growing and is being highlighted by things like footballers ‘taking the knee’ before each match.

Ferdinand’s documentary touches on the incident where Liverpool Football Club rallied round its Uruguayan striker, Luis Suarez, after he made a racist remark to Manchester United’s, Patrice Evra. One of Ferdinand’s friends was a Liverpool player who rallied round his team-mate, Suarez. What the documentary does not focus on is the fact that the Suarez-Evra incident was 8 days before the Terry-Ferdinand one. Ferdinand was caught in a whirlwind in 2011 where he must have felt that people – even his white friends – would not understand his feelings. That is why he didn’t speak out in 2011. In 2020 this is changing and perhaps movements such as Black Lives Matter, has given him the confidence to speak out.

We view our past through a different lens and we forget the actual context of the past. Regret is useful, however, if we engage with it and try to understand it. We all make mistakes – small ones and big ones. We don’t have to get to a place where we are delusional and don’t believe that some of the things we did were mistakes – instead, we need to get to a place where we accept our human frailty and accept that we messed up and accept that our regret today is actually a sign of our growth. If we do not regret mistakes, or the hurt or the pain we may have caused others, then we are surely some sort of sociopath!

Nonetheless we have to temper our regret with understanding and compassion if we are to maintain our self-worth. We need, for example, to talk to our 20-something self the way we would talk to a 20-something lad coming to us seeking guidance. Ferdinand may feel regret, guilt and shame for not speaking out when he was racially abused. He may feel “he didn’t do enough” or that “he let black people down” (as some leading activists suggested at the time), but he can’t change his response in 2011, now. He cannot change the past so he needs to work through those feelings and understand his 26 year-old self and his predicament. He needs to understand why he did not feel powerful enough in 2011. His 2020 documentary is powerful – probably more-so because we hadn’t heard from him and probably more-so because we know how much he suffered in silence. His voice is powerful now – it might not have been in 2011 – and he needs to focus on that.

Regrets are always painful. They don’t have to be destructive though. With a compassionate view of your younger (and different) self, you can work through it and use your regrets as learning points – in a constructive way. Our past actions have got us to where we are today. Without making mistakes and without regret we will never grow…